The Tamesis
You can’t really “discover” Mavis Galante; only by reading her short stories and reawakening literature, reading, and words can you join the ranks of those who are crazy about her, almost crazy! I was drawn to a (very) short story (“The Orphan’s Progress”) unceremoniously shoehorned into the middle. Unrecorded stories of Mavis Galantepublished earlier this year, I rushed online to see if I could find anything about it; just a few months earlier, Margaret Atwood had written a paean to this brief but brutal masterpiece. How cruel? “When women get weird, it happens very quickly,” Galante writes in the story’s first paragraph. “The first sign is a lack of care for clothes and hair, and immediately they turn into sluts.” The intellectual sage of our time, Fran Lebowitz, called Galante “the irrefutable master of the English short story.”
To say that the arrangement of “Orphan’s Progress” lacks ceremony is to misunderstand the purpose of the book: a dazzling collection of stories, some of which might have been lost in time if not for the diligent work of the collection’s editor, novelist Garth Rick Hallberg. (Hallberg’s introduction is a love letter that dwarfs this article, and is a wonderful introduction to future treasures.) There have been collections of Galante’s work before, including a wonderful story collection Stories from the common man’s library – but there are also stories that have never been collected before or are completely out of print.
This is not surprising considering that Galante was one of the most prolific short story writers of her time. She wrote 103 stories just to this new yorker— more than Cheever, almost as much as Updike — but she is far less famous than those giants, perhaps because of her gender, perhaps because she does not belong to the American literary community (Galant was born in Canada and moved to Paris in 1950 at the age of 28). An episode from her own life illustrates how difficult it was for women of that era to insist on the centrality of their own experience: When her military husband returned from World War II, she told him she wanted to move to Europe. He refused, the marriage ended, and, as she puts it, “for the rest of his life he was proud to see himself in most of my male protagonists. But that was never true!”
Through the chronological collection, you can sometimes sense the writers’ growing pains, their less than adept articulation of youthful experiences, and the biographical clues that lie close to the surface. Gallant literally disappeared from her life. At the age of four, her mother left her in a convent. Orphans and other girls seeking connection populate her stories. She is bilingual, and her story reflects the contempt and superiority of both English and French speakers. During World War II, Galante worked for a newspaper in Montreal, an experience that awakened in her an energy that would stay with her throughout her life. “When I realized I was making about half what the men were making,” she wrote in a story about a budding reporter (“With a Capital T”), “I decided to do half the job.” She was harder on herself than any editor, but she never really did half the job. (“Make me happy,” William Maxwell once wrote to her, “by sending me stories.”) Galante never married and had no children. The women in her stories feel a deep and palpable uncertainty about tradition—they are not iconoclasts so much as ferocious individuals.
